Nerve Endings Firing Away

I’ve been largely absent on or have scarcely posted on this blog in recent weeks in spite of no lack of news to blog about. I could go on and on about being neck deep in writing my dissertation or driving up to Houston sometimes thrice in a week to help my in-laws transition to a new country but I will not (perhaps I already did).

But upgrading to the latest release (2.7) from WordPress aka Coltrane is enough to inspire me to blog again. I’m writing this using the immensely convenient QuickPress right on the Dashboard. If you have upgraded, you must have feasted your eyes on the delicious new interface which is not only intuitive but also extremely customizable. I’m still digging around with new features like replying to comments from within the Dashboard instead of from the blog’s front end or expressing relief that an update feature is now built in the Core (farewell WPAU and thanks!)

As usual, I had my upgrade woes although quite minor this time. The WPAU plugin failed to indicate as it usually does for quite a long time that the new release was out (on all three blogs). Twitter was instantly abuzz about the new release and I wanted to get my hands on it too. Spoiled by the WPAU’s convenience, I didn’t want to go back to the manual upgrade so I decided to do something different. I modified the version number to an earlier version in the version.php file located in /wp-includes directory (WP gurus will warn you against this). This instantly kicked in WPAU’s alert message and allowed me to download and upgrade to the new 2.7 version. Thankfully, I did this only on one blog before WPAU came to its senses on other blogs and I continued upgrading the regular way. And the final straw is that I was doing all this at 3am woken up by the stifling heat that kicked in following the snow we got earlier in the evening.

Bored already? I never said I had anything insightful to share to break my blog silence. I just needed to write something using the spanking new WordPress 2.7. In the spirit of Palinism, don’t real bloggers spend more time fiddling behind the blog than on it? :)